Past Imperfect -- For Antiques Collectors, Images From The `Mammy' Days Are Now Very Expensive Lessons In African-American History

On the corner of Seventh and Pine, the Two Weeks barber shop offers a haircut, a shoeshine and a step back in time. A long wooden bench divides the store's interior. Three barbers snap their scissors on one side and an array of trinkets and antiques are for sale on the other. A huge shoeshine stand fills a cubicle against the back wall.

Under a glass case filled with collectibles rests a faded white sign in a black frame about two feet wide and eight inches deep. Printed in 1913, it has a small logo centered near the bottom that reads "Cotton Belt Route." The sign offers an instruction, but its message vanished years ago, along the with bus stops on two-lane highways and crowded railroad depots where passengers awaited trains for all parts of the nation. In bold letters, the sign says: COLORED WAITING ROOM.

"When African Americans look at that they just stand there and go `wow, that's deep,' " said Anton Marshall, the curator of this mini-museum. "They are going through all these scenes in the back of their minds, but the biggest thing that knocks them out is the price."

The sign costs $300.

Signs, posters, salt and pepper shakers, dolls and a host of other items make up what is called the black collectibles market, one strand of the antique business that has fragmented into many specialized areas for collectors. Up until about six years ago, there was little interest in black collectibles. Much of the material now selling at high prices could be picked up for loose change at garage sales and flea markets, Marshall said.

Signs such as Marshall's that are relics of segregation are some of the most valuable items.

"For a long time people tried to forget about this period," said Marshall. "People either threw these signs away or stored them in the attic. But if you can bring those suckers to market they are worth serious money."

Although some African Americans find this whole business appalling, Marshall says only a few people who have passed through the barber shop have registered complaints.

"These things evoke ominous emotions," he conceded, "but by the same token, it's like having a real piece of history, like having the first gun that was fired during the Civil War. Collecting this stuff shows how far we have evolved. We can put the Jim Crow era in perspective and appreciate that we have overcome it."

Sharon Greenman oversees one of the larger collections of this memorabilia in the Pioneer Square Mall antique bazaar.

"I sometimes have mixed emotions about this," said Greenman, who has been involved in both the civil rights and feminist movements. "We try to balance things by collecting positive images as well."

Two positive items: A plate embossed with a family photo ($24) and a comic book ($6) illustrating the life of Frederick Douglass, who published the leading abolitionist newspaper, North Star, from 1847 to 1863. Along the lines of Classic comic books, the Douglass story was part of an illustrated series on notable African Americans put out in the late 1960s by a now-defunct Seattle company, Baylor Publishing.

An old lithograph from Harper's Weekly sends out an ambiguous signal. A dignified maid sits in a fine chair, a box of face powder in her lap. She holds an oval mirror in her left hand, a powder puff in her right. The caption reads: "Just like the Missus."

Among the more notorious items at the Pioneer Square mall, in addition to a "mammy" door stop, are the souvenirs from the Coon Chicken Inn, a restaurant that was popular in the '40s and '50s, with outlets in Seattle, Portland, Spokane and Salt Lake City.

The inn's lurid logo, a grotesque caricature of a smiling black waiter, is on all the items: a bread plate ($150); a brass toothpick holder (300); a kid's menu ($120); a dinner plate that is filled by the image of a winking waiter's face, with huge red lips and the restaurant's name spelled out on his teeth ($296).

In a recent book, "Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black Collectibles and American Stereotyping," Kenneth Goings writes that 10 years ago, about 80 percent of the collectors were white, but that the ratio now has almost reversed. Such well-known personalities as Whoopi Goldberg, Bill Cosby and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, along with middle-class AfricanAmericans, are snapping up these items with the attitude "these images can no longer hurt us," said Goings, a historian at Florida Atlantic University.

While researching the book, Goings discovered that the field of black collectibles was opened up by salt-and-pepper-shaker figurines of Aunt Jemima, the cook, and Uncle Mose, the butler.

Using that stereotype as a backdrop for some keen observations on the underside of American cultural history, the book reproduces a shocking landscape of racist kitsch: a planter of a boy eating a watermelon; "pickaninnie" faces arranged around a fan-out calendar; an alligator bottle opener with jaws that, when spread to fit a bottle neck, reveal the swallowed body of a black man.

Nonetheless, Goings, who admits he spent too much money amassing his own collection, says that in his imagination he sees Aunt Jemima "not as a cook but a fighter for freedom" and Uncle Mose not as a "faithful butler but an activist and orator."

Marshall echoes this sentiment. His favorite piece is a two-foot-high cast-iron statue of a jockey, his hand extended holding a sign with the family name on it. "Jocko" became a fixture on suburban lawns with the expansion of tract housing after World War II.

This Jocko, outfitted in yellow pants and a green riding jacket, stands near the bench in the Two Weeks barber shop.

"We've heard everything from you ought to destroy that to you ought to paint him white and put him in your yard," said Marshall. "But we're not going to change it. The way it is now gives him his uniqueness and power."

Marshall then qualified his assertion, pointing to Jocko's hand.

"There's the ring where a sign hung on it. We stuck a fishing pole in there, so he's been slightly altered to give him more integrity.

"See, he's able to do his own thing. Gone fishin'. He's got a suit on and one hand in his pocket. But he can fish with one hand. He's smooth."